Bringing Data to Life

Vinod Rao chose Illinois Institute of Technology because of the Data Science program鈥檚 uniqueness. The hands-on faculty provide a personable experience to the individual student, the departments collaborate with industry businesses in innovative projects, and the coursework is aligned with the demand of today鈥檚 technology in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, and statistics.

Rao says, 鈥淭he foundational theories of machine learning, statistics, and probability from the classroom are always helping me to analyze data and [perform] estimation.鈥

The required capstone practicum project matches student teams with businesses to find solutions to economic, industrial, and environmental concerns. Rao鈥檚 auto insurance project, for example, involved forecasting a near-future event based on existing patterns. Using a recurrent neural network, the team built a machine-learning model in Python programming language.

鈥淭hat helps also to learn deeply,鈥 adds Rao. 鈥淭he real data science comes into life when we solve problem in industries. Then actual learning starts.鈥